What To Do With Prophesies

I mean, if they weren’t, we wouldn’t still be enamored with them after like, four thousand-plus years. Admittedly, some depictions of Fate and Destiny in fiction are lame, but that’s more a quality-of-writing thing than the concept itself.

Prophesies are a pain in the butt to deal with in-game. Why?

Honestly, because you don’t know how things are going to turn out.

That’s the beginning, middle, and end of the problem. You need rules and game mechanics to do a thing which you literally cannot do.

But you also literally cannot do magic or juggle flaming axes (though if you work really hard at the second one, you can), so what makes prophesy any different?

I think part of the problem is that like alignment, people are always fighting the concept of Destiny. Everyone is more or less guilty of this — players and Dungeon Masters alike. Fate is there to be fought, it’s the ultimate in immaterial foes.

Some pantheons put a god in charge of Fate, but the Greeks knew better.

Even the gods were subject to Fate.

And Destiny has irony on its side. Unlike most forces (narrative and otherwise), Fate can win ironic, as well as moral, or even just normal victories.

Now, there is a related problem in trying to work out what Divination does, but let’s come back to that. Divination is a similar problem, but mostly what we’re trying to figure out is how to mechanically determine future outcomes.

The easier, the better.

Let’s see if we can factor this problem.

What does anyone want a prophesy to do?

A prophesy addresses the question of, “what would happen if you could know how things were going to turn out ahead of time?” If you could “see the future,” right? Whatever “the future” might be in this context.

What if you knew the consequences of your actions before you took them?

“Will I ever acquire this artifact?”
“How will I acquire this artifact?”
“Will I live forever?”
“How can I rule the world forever?”

I mean, some of these questions might seem stupid, but you have to remember the people in fiction you generally call upon prophets and oracles. Generally speaking, people in positions of power who abuse their privileges get all the prophesies.

Fiction is not kind to them.

Secondly, prophesies in fiction tend to be used as narrative devices. I would call Destiny “primitive foreshadowing,” but that’s not being really fair to the concept, which is older than what we understand to – be – a narrative.

Well, here’s the thing.

Like anything the players decide to do — taking action-wise — a Prophesy (or any Divination, for that matter) should always add something to the game.

Even if you use dice to ultimately decide the content of a Prophesy, any use of Prophesy should be something relevant to the campaign, like how rolling any random encounter adds those monsters to a campaign.

“There are ogres now, okay?”

In the past, I’ve tried to create a “Mad Libs” version of Prophesy, but I don’t think that’s going to work. I have another idea hat breaks Prophetic targets into scope and such, kind of based on other “tiers” of magical effects.

Another thing that Prophesies tend to do is complicate things.

If you want to know how an Evil Overlord will be defeated, you almost always have to acquire a Chosen One or a Sword of Destiny in order to see it through. This is your responsibility for taking the “Fate” route.

Yes and no. I think one of the long-standing problems with how divination spells are written is in how they assume the information exists before the players use the spells.

I can think of a few times I had a PC whip out “detect evil” on an incidental NPC who I had improvised and barely named.

Any time a player does something deliberately, it should add something to the game. Players are welcome to _ignore_ anything after it’s been created, that’s one of the unwritten rules of the RPG, but their actions should be generative.

So, information-gathering skills and spells have always been kind of . . . bad? I guess, because rather than adding something to the game, they place a demand on the Dungeon Master to create something.

The flip side of this of course, is when the PCs are SUPPOSED to learn something, but they either lack the aforementioned skills/spells, or they don’t think to use them. This is the classic problem with spot/listen/search.

I was talking specifically of what I consider prophesy, which is to say, forecasting some event or action. I do not consider Detect Evil to be prophesy in the game sense.

Detect evil in my games does not detect alignment. It detects short term malign intent, or, in the special case of an evil divine character (cleric, paladin) would detect an aura of evil. A simple lawful evil NPC that is just trying to get an advantageous deal with a PC does not detect as evil in my games.

This helps me use such information to serve me rather than simply bug me.

D&D doesn’t use “prophesy” and “divination” interchangeably the way you’re using them. While the dictionary definition of divination might be “foretelling future events,” D&D’s divination is more a generalized magical information gathering school.

The entire scrying subschool is considered divination even though it’s looking at another location in the present time. Speak with animals enables two-way communication with non-sentient beasts. Comprehend languages and tongues function similarly, but for languages.

The various detect and locate spells find things that exist in the present, like detect traps and snares, detect animals, and detect undead. Detect magic determines the presence of magic in a person, object, or place and will name the school of the spell under the right circumstances.

And if you alter the function of these spells so that they’re discovered precisely BECAUSE the PC finds them in the future, which enables them to find them (or avoid them) . . . then I guess you’re more comfortable with the idea of creating paradoxes than I am.

Er – no – I am saying that Prophesy and divination are not interchangeable. I am saying prophesy is a subset of divination. I was drawing attention to the fact that your first blog post seems to treat them interchangeably.